Evolutionary Medicine

Teaching Strategies

I decided to move away from the traditional learning style in many classrooms. As a teacher for over 25 years, I have been used to the “I do, we do, you do” method. I show the students how, we practice together, and then they complete the task on their own. I moved away from this approach because the students were sitting at their desks, copying work off the board to students working in randomly selected groups of three on thinking tasks from the curriculum. I adopted a new approach called Building Thinking Classrooms.

Building Thinking Classrooms

Building thinking classrooms (BTC) is a teaching strategy in which students receive a task and decide what mathematical strategy will best solve it. Students stand at wall-mounted whiteboards, in groups of no more than three, while they work through their thinking tasks. Each group has one marker and the person with the marker must write their group members' ideas and not their ideas. I set a timer for 2 minutes and the students know that when the timer goes off the students pass the marker to another group member. This allows the work to be equally distributed amongst the students throughout the tasks. The students must discuss their strategy together as they are working through each task. This allows the students to share their ideas as well as allowing them to see different strategies that can be used to solve the same problem. The boards are visible to every group, and they are allowed to borrow ideas from other groups if they are stuck.

Problem-Based Learning

In a problem-based curriculum, students spend most of their time in class working on carefully crafted and sequenced problems. Teachers help students understand the problems; ask questions to push their thinking, and orchestrate discussions to be sure that the mathematical takeaways are clear¹⁸. Students gain a lasting understanding of math concepts and procedures and experience applying this knowledge to new situations. Students frequently collaborate with their classmates—they talk about math, listen to each other’s ideas, justify their thinking, and critique the reasoning of others. They gain experience communicating their ideas both verbally and in writing, developing skills that will serve them well throughout their lives.

Problem-based learning may look different from what their parents experienced in their math education. Current research says that students need to be able to think flexibly to use mathematical skills in their lives¹⁹. Flexible thinking relies on understanding concepts and making connections between them. Over time, students gain the skills and the confidence to independently solve problems that they've never seen before.

Three Reads (MLR6 Three Reads)

The Three Reads strategy is used to support reading comprehension of the problem, without solving it for students²⁰. The first read focuses on the situation, context, or main idea of the text. After a shared reading, I ask students “What is this situation about?” This is the time to identify and resolve any challenges with any non-mathematical vocabulary. After the second read, students list any quantities that can be counted or measured. They should not focus on specific values; instead, they focus on naming what is countable or measurable in the situation. It is not necessary to discuss the relevance of the quantities, just to be specific about them (examples: “number of people in her family” rather than “people,” “number of markers after” instead of “markers”). They should record the quantities to use as a reference after the third read. During the third read, the final question or prompt is revealed and students should discuss possible solution strategies, referencing the relevant quantities recorded after the second read. It may be helpful for students to create diagrams to represent the relationships among quantities identified in the second read or to represent the situation with a picture.

Scaffolding

Scaffolding provides temporary supports that foster student autonomy. Learners with emerging language—at any level—can engage deeply with central mathematical ideas under specific instructional conditions. Mathematical language development occurs when students use their developing language to make meaning and engage with challenging problems that are beyond students’ mathematical ability to solve independently and therefore require interaction with peers. However, these interactions should be structured with temporary access supports that students can use to make sense of what is being asked of them, to help organize their thinking, and to give and receive feedback.

Activating Previous Learning

In each of my lessons, it is essential to activate previous learning so that students are more successful and fluent when completing group tasks. The first event in every lesson is a warm-up. Either a warm-up will help the student get ready for the day’s lesson, or it will allow the students to strengthen their number sense or procedural fluency.

A warm-up that helps students get ready for today’s lesson might serve to remind them of a context they have seen before, get them thinking about where the previous lesson left off, or preview a calculation that will happen in the lesson so that the calculation doesn't get in the way of learning new mathematics. This is a great way to review skills necessary for the upcoming lesson without having to reach the skill.

A warm-up that is meant to strengthen number sense or procedural fluency asks students to do mental arithmetic or reason numerically or algebraically. It gives them a chance to make deeper connections or become more flexible in their thinking.

A sample task could be to have the students fill in the missing values. The students will copy the table onto their whiteboards and work together to fill in the missing values:

Self-Reflection

Another important strategy that I embed in my classroom is an end-of-lesson cool-down to support students' self-reflection on what they have learned during the lesson.  After the activities are completed, students will take time to synthesize what they have learned before working on their cool-down. I will use this time to pose questions verbally and call on volunteers to respond. A cool-down task is then given to students to complete. Students will work on the cool-down for about 5-7 minutes independently and turn it in. The cool-down serves as a brief formative assessment to determine whether students understood the lesson²¹.

Real-world applications

The real-world application allows the learner to acquire a deeper knowledge through the exploration of real-world challenges and problems. An example of how to apply this application to this unit could be as simple as using a medicine-dosing schedule from a type of medicine students may encounter daily. For example:

To show how medicine dosages relate to ratios give the students a sample dosing chart and have them calculate doses over 24 hours. The task could read, a medicine label reads, “Take 2 tablets every 4 hours”. Do not take more than six tablets in 24 hours. Complete the table to show the missing values.